The Importance of Your Countenance

        

After his tenth visit to Second Looks Exhibits, the man with the orange hair, a look he could only have achieved by soaking his head in a tub of Clorox, still had no satisfactory answer to his very simple question, “Where is my wife Carol?” so he threatened to shoot James the delivery guy in the leg; gesturing with something in his pocket that looked awfully like a gun. After that, it was easy for the man with the Cloroxed hair to round everyone up and deposit them in the lunchroom.

Once depositing them, he shoved them one by one to the floor, promising they could all leave as soon as someone answered the aforementioned question- plus one other: Where could he find the big boss Jack? When no one volunteered an answer to either question after 15 seconds, the man with the crazy hair whose name was Jeff made the threatening gesture a second time, but this time toward a guy named Bill who was in sales.

It was then that Jean, the Installation and Dismantlement Supervisor, Jean, the 15 year veteran of Second Looks Exhibits who sat alone at a desk near the loading dock and had been secretly dubbed The Jeaniator at a companywide meeting held at the Lincolnshire Inn last fall after the sales force had watched the Arnold classic in Carol’s room after hours, raised her head from the floor and began to make noise.

“I don’t know where Carol is!” Jean said. “But if I did I’d tell you!”

When Jean entered a room, try as she might, and she did try for a long time, she did not blend in. It was as if by some mechanism not under her control she took up more than her fair share of oxygen and as a result, everyone else in the room had to turn themselves down a notch. Her handbag, her coat, anything she might carry expanded and spread as soon as she put it down, try as she might to keep her personal belongings tidy and neat. She continually blundered into conversations bringing all discourse to a halt within seconds.

“Jack’s out of town at a show,” Jean added staggering to her knees -a gun in this guy’s pocket be damned.

It was then that she recognized and even remembered the name of the man holding them all hostage. It was Jeff. They had met last year at the Christmas party last year. The two of them had been left standing alone at the dessert table. She remembered him because she was the one who was driven away by the awkwardness of their small talk and usually it was the other way. “Maybe Carol’s with him.”

That’s when Maria from the art department let out a little groan.

For a while, Jean suspected the reason people didn’t seem comfortable around her was that she had a loud voice and was a bigger woman than average. But gradually as Jean passed through high school, college, her first job, and a series of failed romantic relationships she realized the reason her aim in conversations were off and her forays into group conversations always missed the mark was because she had failed to read The Book; the book all people, especially woman, are supposed to read very early on to learn how to act, react, and just be with other people.  And now it was too late.

Maria, on the other hand, Jean knew, had read The Book cover to cover, probably starting in utero, and by the time her path crossed Jean’s she'd read the book so many times and knew it so well she was the sort of person people mentioned right after extending an invitation to ensure your attendance. “Maria will be there!”

Once standing, Jean greeted Jeff in the same tone she’d used whenever she’d bumped into him at the office when he'd stopped by to pick up Carol, which come to think of it hadn’t been for a while. “Hey, Jeff. How’s it goin’?”

“Not so good,” Jeff said focusing on Jean. “But I guess you could figure that out.”

“I guess I could,” Jean said focusing back.

Almost as soon as Jeff looked Jean in the eyes, and certainly by the time he spoke to her she knew- Jeff wouldn’t hurt anyone here today. Some other day he might hurt himself or be a danger to others, but not here and not today. She knew this for the same reason she’d been able to do her job so well for 15 years- a job most people couldn’t do well for even one. A job that required an exacting ability to handle nervous, overwrought, overspent customers when their exhibits didn’t ship on time to the show, or when the logo on their banner was printed backward, or when their bill was nowhere near their estimate. Jean had this ability and thus this job because all though Jean hadn’t read the book most young women read, she had read another one. One that taught her how to be with people when their insides were on the outside. Not the usual way, the other way around.

“I could figure that much out for sure.” Jean continued, slowly preparing to go to work. “Life’s a bitch sometimes.”

 And then she became the Jeaninator. After an hour and a half of listening and talking that included paraphrasing, commiseration, good-natured scolding, sympathy, and dire warnings, and even a break for water, all at the exact right moment they were called for, Jeff backed out the door of the lunchroom and left the building. But not before taking off his jacket and showing everyone that not only did he not have a gun in his pocket he had no weapon of any sort on him. He was as harmless as a fly. He also added that he was sorry he had acted so badly and asked for forgiveness joking that besides believing his wife was having an affair with her boss he was having a bad hair day. At this point Maria chimed in and told him about a good hairdresser who did a great job with corrective color.

After all the authorities the HR dept. could think of, including the local police, the state police, OSHA, the local branch of the Dept of Mental Health, and the FBI (the new woman from HR wanted to make sure all bases were covered), were notified about the incident and during all the meetings on workplace violence and the importance of stress management, and during all the gossip about what was going to happen to Jeff, right through the brass tacks discussions on whether Carol and the big boss really were having an affair, everyone in the company talked about how it was Jean who was able to get through to the crazy jealous husband. But after a week or so, Bill in sales started to talk about the events of the day with a smirk and in

such a way as to indicate it clearly took a nut to handle a nut. Then Leslie from billing, another devotee of The Book as far as Jean could figure, started to tell the story about Jean’s intervention in the same tone you would tell a story about a clever dog warning the family about a fire with a well-timed bark, and eventually, the story of what happened at Second Look Exhibits was rewritten so that Marie was the person who had talked Jeff into leaving the building after carefully ascertaining there was no gun, no explosives, nothing to hurt anyone. And the world at Second Look exhibits was set right again.

Jean knew the reset was complete one sunny afternoon around the first day of spring when most of the staff began gravitating as if by an unspoken command to the picnic table in back of the loading dock to eat their lunch together while she ate alone in the lunchroom watching everyone shuffle back and forth to the refrigerator to grab refills of coke.

Later that same afternoon when Jean was at her normal post by the loading dock, Jacob the sole proprietor of a small sign shop who occasionally did work for Second Look Exhibits stopped by to drop off a 30 x 40 vinyl sign. Jacob was a tall, thin man close to Jean’s age with the peculiar habit of tilting his head sideways right before he spoke. When Jean asked him about this once he told her it was his way of warning people he was getting ready to say something, to dive into the conversation. This struck Jean as brilliant, and so normally Jean would look forward to their conversations: maybe about the courses he was taking at night to get his degree, or what they had watched on TV the night before. But today she was having none of it. As soon as Jacob pulled his van up to the loading dock, Jean jumped up from her desk; knocking her computer keyboard to the floor along with what was left of her morning coffee.

“Jesus H Christ!” She watched the coffee make its way into her computer’s keys. “Am I to have no life whatsoever??!!” She kicked at the keyboard and missed, smacking her foot on the corner of a heavy crate.

“Jean,” Jacob asked when he saw her hopping on one foot. He tilted his head at an extreme angle. “Are you hurt?”

“No, I’m fine,” Jean said not looking at Jacob. “It’s just my toe.”

“You’re sure?” Jacob said while taking in the entire scene. “I think you might really be hurt.”

“No, really I’m OK. I just stubbed my toe.”

“No, I meant hurt here…” He placed his fist over his heart and tapped twice.

Jean plopped back in her chair and looked at the floor. “How could you tell?”

“I don’t need to get my degree to know that.” He said without tilting his head this time. “It’s not the kind of thing you learn in a book.”

After he said that, Jean looked up and smiled. A smile they both knew came from both inside and out.